The Price You Pay to Play

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State of Play: Why should every game cost $60?

By Rus McLaughlin

I'm a cheap bastard. Blame my traditionally tightfisted Scots/Irish heritage if you want, but you'll never see me spend $20 if I can get it for $19.99. When there's something I want, I arbitrarily decide how much it's intrinsically worth, then I wait and plot until I can nab it for that price. Or less.

That makes me the mortal enemy of the entire video game industry, because I don't rate every console release as worth the $60 price tag. Since nearly all console releases run sixty a pop ($50 for Nintendo titles), that standard applies to as many good games as bad ones. Sure, Bayonetta, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and Assassin's Creed II are arguably the gaming equivalents of required reading, and I played the hell out of them. But I won't be throwing down cash any time soon. Not at these prices.

It's not just a budgetary issue, either. We all went nuts when Metroid: Other M was announced at E3, and everything I've seen so far puts it high on my must-play list. The thing is, I've never shelled out fifty dollars for a side-scroller before and, minus a little stylistic sleight-of-hand, that's what Other M is. These days, for that genre of game, I kick out ten or fifteen bucks, tops. For a download.

Which is to say, a fixed price system makes no kind of sense when it comes to video games. Unless you really start thinking about it.

Value for money is major issue in gaming, and what you get for your sixty varies wildly. The campaign might be twenty hours, or six, or non-existent. Maybe there's multiplayer, maybe not. You tell me, friend... is a fifteen hour campaign equal to an eight hour campaign with online deathmatches? Or a ten hour campaign with local multiplayer only?

Those answers largely come down to personal preference, but there's no arguing unequal games cost equal amounts. A short, broken mess like Rogue Warrior carries the exact same MSRP as Fallout 3, which rocks over ten times the content and a few thousand more layers of polish. But if Rogue Warrior is grossly overpriced for what it offers, then Fallout 3 is clearly under-priced. Digging every secret and side quest out of the Capital Wasteland can take between sixty and a hundred hours... that's a hell of a lot of game for your dollar. To the point where I can't help but think developer/publisher Bethesda got slightly shafted.

Premium games used to come at a premium price. Carts for the Atari 2600 generally ran between $20-$30, with second-party publishers like Activision and Parker Bros. slightly undercutting first-party Atari titles. But if brand and quality were factors, so too was hype. Ports of popular arcade titles usually cost more, and Pac Man for the Atari 2600 (the most anticipated game of 1982) cost more than any other cart on the market. Why? Because it was the most anticipated game of 1982. Supply and Demand 101. Then critics lynched it en masse, and supply suddenly outstripped demand by five million units. The entire gaming market crashed soon after. Whoops.

Nevertheless, flex pricing still has fans. Bobby Kotick, President and CEO of Activision Blizzard, makes no bones about wanting to charge more for his company's products. Indeed, rumors claimed Kotick staked out Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the most anticipated game of 2009) to finally raise the console cap to $70. That fell through in North America, but gamers in the UK do pony up a few extra euros, and PC gamers get pinched an extra ten dollars for the privilege of playing Activision's moneymaker. Too bad those funds don't go towards dedicated multiplayer servers.

What stopped Kotick from an across-the-board hike? Well, it wasn't the Ghost of Christmas Future. Far more likely, the same people who bumped games from $50 to $60 in the first place stepped in and told him no.

Acting like you are shooting things online isn't cheap.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo ultimately set prices for games running on their hardware. If you're looking for culprits, Microsoft inaugurated the $60 price point to offset the huge costs - and huge risks - of launching the Xbox 360 a year ahead of the competition. Nintendo alone didn't raise prices because they didn't need the subsidy; their console sold at profit from day one. Or maybe Nintendo still felt the 2002 sting of a $200 million price-fixing fine imposed on them by the European Commission. Either way, and even though most Year One 360 releases were virtually identical to their cheaper PlayStation 2 ports, by the time the PlayStation 3 and Wii came online, $60 was accepted as the price you paid to game on a 7th Generation console.

Yes, it was a bit of a gouge. And yes, it worked. People tend to automatically translate "expensive" as "better," and if there's one thing gamers want, it's "better."

So maybe you're wondering where that money goes. A lot of things have to be paid off or paid out before a publisher makes money and a developer earns royalties. The numbers fluctuate, but generally it shakes out like this.